How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill

I've often seen this book on the shelves at the book store and have always tempted to buy it. I just never pulled the trigger. Recently, when I was back in the United States (for a weekend), I stepped into the local used book store with my niece and we both walked out with an armful of books (for very little cash). My stack of books included this one by Thomas Cahill.

So how exactly did the Irish save civilization? I'll try to summarize as best I can.

At the point in history when the Holy Roman Empire was collapsing, Ireland was converting to Catholicism under St. Patrick. Ireland's geographic location aided them in their ability to seclude themselves from the barbarians in France and Germany that were one of the causes of the fall of Rome.

As St. Patrick was evangelizing Ireland, a trail of abbeys were left in his wake. These abbeys, protected from the barbarians by geography, were the seeds of civilization that fell from the flower of Rome (which had in turn, preserved civilized thought from Greece). Without these abbeys copying texts and adding their own Irish form (writing down their own oral tradition in the margins) to the newly copied texts, books such as The Bible and Plato's Republic may not have survived. The Book of Kells is the oldest existing copy of The Bible and it sits on display at Trinity College in Dublin. What St. Patrick started and St. Brigit continued in Ireland was passed on for three hundred years and the evangelistic Irish monks reached all the way back to Rome, planting the seeds of civilization along the way.

That is . . . until the Vikings came. The arrival of the Vikings in Ireland began the downfall of the Irish influence on civilization as the bejeweled texts (housed in the abbeys) were highly desired loot by the Viking raiders. Thousands of books were stolen or destroyed as Vikings raided the abbeys along the rocky coasts of Ireland. The Book of Kells survived only by being moved further inland to the city of Kells from whence it receives its name. The Vikings eventially created coastal settlements in Ireland and came to influence the Irish culture in their own fashion, but that - as they say - is a story for a different day.

As for books, I found it very informative and pertinent to all of the Irish monastic sites that I've visited. However, if you didn't find the above intriguing, you can probably do without reading this book. This book gets a 6.5 (out of 10) on the HRputer book rating scale.